Rethinking Informality, Episode 3: Final Episode

In the third and final episode of Rethinking Informality, hosts Miria Gambardella and Griet De Lombaerde turn to Latin America and the field of popular economies. They are joined by Cristina Cielo and Alioscia Castronovo, whose work has contributed to critical debates on popular economies, social reproduction, care, self-management, commoning, and popular forms of institutionality. The conversation dives into the limits of ‘informality’ as a category and the popular economy as an alternative to it. It discusses its origins and explores related concepts such as reproduction, value, and the making of economic life, as well as autonomy, commoning, and the ambivalences of popular economies. Finally, it questions what we gain or lose when we abandon the category of ‘informality’. The conversation concludes with some reflections from the guests on how to move forward in the field of economic anthropology.
 
 

Guests

Cristina Cielo is a research professor in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at FLACSO Ecuador. She explores the subjective and political dimensions of inequalities, with a particular interest in ecologies and economies of the global south. Her research topics include violence and care in extractive logics, transformations in the production of knowledge, and urban-popular politics and economics. Her recent work brings feminist perspectives of expanded reproduction to the study of popular practices that must increasingly negotiate with illicit and militarized organizations and structures, exploring creative responses that reshape possibilities in contexts of dispossession and conflict.
 

Alioscia Castronovo is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow (2024-2026) at Padua University, Italy, PI of the STARS Starting Grants Project “Popular economies in Latin America: urban territories and self organization in Colombia”. He gained a Phd in Urban Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and Social Anthropology at IDAES UNSAM, Argentina. Co-coordinator of the GT CLACSO “Popular Economies: mapping theory and practices” , member of GSEID UNAL and the Urban Popular Economy Collective, he published in Revista Íconos, ACME, Scienze del Territorio, South Atlantic Quarterly, Public Culture, Tracce Urbane and his first book “Territories of the Common”, for Lettera22 Edizioni, Italy.

 
Hosts

Miria Gambardella is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Researcher at the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale (CCI) and a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores informal and autonomous economic practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with European social movements and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, focusing on the ethics and politics of coffee circulation. She is part of PRESILIENT, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally.
 

Griet De Lombaerde is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD fellow at the University of Split and part of the Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network PRESILIENT (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally. Her research focuses on the nexus between environmental migration and the urban informal economy in Bolivia, with special attention for the social and economic implications of migration, displacement, and informality in the cities of La Paz and El Alto.